The load times of a rich web application's initial page suffer as a client needs to render the layout in a browser. An existing work-around to this problem is rendering the layout (e.g., HTML version) of the first page of the application on a server and then allowing the application to initialize while the user sees a usable view that is somewhat similar to what the user will see in the initialized application. However, the rendering server does not know the time zone applicable in the user's browser, and therefore is unable to render any time information for display to the user in the initial page of the web application.